We see that knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a participator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object of knowledge resides in consequences of directed action. (Quest, 157)
Armchair quarterbacks who complain about botched passes. Well-meaning friends who suggest your child should play the violin. Accountability-minded administrators who use check lists during classroom observations. Each of these groups of people “know” things. The armchair quarterback gets to see instant replays. The friend gets to project wishes onto a child they don’t live with 24/7. The administrator gets to use a check-list to determine that you need better classroom management skills. Each group has knowledge. But the knowledge they have is not only limited, it isn’t that important. The armchair quarterback isn’t actually on the field staring at advancing defensive lineman and making immediate decisions about passing the football. The friend isn’t around long enough to know whether the child is talented, disciplined, or even interested in music. The administrator isn’t in the classroom with the various students long enough to understand the culture of your room.
The real trick in understanding the point is to acknowledge that teachers suffer from the same problem: they often treat their students like they are treated. Teachers become armchair quarterbacks, well-meaning friends, and administrators to their students. Covering material because of ITBS or other standardized testing constraints, assuming they know what students need without getting to know students first, and imposing their own version of check-lists in the form of worksheets and other busy work that are detached from students’ lives–teachers fall into the same trap that Dewey warns us about. We can’t treat knowledge as a static entity. Knowledge isn’t a series of discreet bits of information passed from a teacher to a student, even though that a major assumption we carry with us. In fact, knowledge isn’t really the point, at all. Knowing is the point. And the risk in not understanding the difference is in turning students into the same kinds of spectators that armchair quarterbacks, well-meaning friends, accountability-minded administrators, (and teachers) often represent.
So, for Dewey, his point was to explain (1) what it means to say that a statement about how things are may or may not correspond to how things actually are, when at the same time, (2) it is not possible to step back and treat this correspondence as if it were a matter of comparing the statement against reality. What we have to do is make judgements in “real time” about consequences of actions in solving actual problems. Correspondence, then, becomes a metaphor for Dewey, allowing him to point out that while a “spectator” version of knowledge is not always wrong, neither does it describe nor explain how people actually use information from their lives to solve problems that they face. The relevance of the “spectator” is in the very detachment Dewey rejects. “Spectators” don’t assert, they passively observe. “Spectators” are outside of experience–at least the kind of experience that is engaging of others.
Here it may be helpful to distinguish between a few key concepts in order to better understand the larger point and it’s relationship to classroom interaction. Knowing, knowledge, and intelligence are distinct for Dewey. Knowing is an inquiry (specific instances of applying oneself to solving problems), knowledge constitutes the stable outcomes of inquiry, and intelligence is the result of the development and accumulation of capabilities to act (i.e., inquire) in specific ways.
Organic and natural environments for learning impel knowing and the habits of intelligence. Detachment from natural environments for learning impel “spectating” and habits of routine. When you participate in the “consequences of directed action,” you side with active inquiry. That is, given Dewey’s theory of knowledge/knowing, classrooms should be places where students make knowledge claims at the very same time they are engaged in knowing (inquiry), since the means and ends are not separable for Dewey, and since the point of inquiry is not to collect detached artifacts anyway. Active engagement of the sort Dewey suggests means students engage rather than observe. They are not in the business of “discovering” the “facts” as though there is some cosmic puzzle to solve for once and for all. Rather, active inquiry puts functionality above abstraction. Active inquiry means students developing problems and actually solving them. As a result, a general pattern emerges where students use their own experiences (individual and joint) as a backdrop to solve other problems. Like an ever-expanding upward spiral, students develop and grow best when their interests are engaged and utilized. Of course, not all inquiry is fruitful. That’s why Dewey talks about “directed action.” Some actions are whim and do not lead to educative experiences. The teacher, then, rather than “directing” students to be “spectators,” directs students toward engage activities, that is, to active inquiry that leads to further inquiry (and knowing). Be clear: directing students to prefabricated “learning centers” or “activity centers” to do busy work is not what Dewey is talking about. Dewey is talking about students becoming experimenters themselves.
Students, therefore, no longer search for “the truth” or “the right answers”; rather, students make assertions that are to be judged by the bounds of their own experiences–bounds that already exist and bounds that expand via inquiry and directed action. This not only represents a big shift in understanding the roles of teachers and students, it shifts the purpose of schooling away from “getting” answers, grades, diplomas, and jobs (Dewey obliquely called this the “quest for certainty”). Such a “quest for certainty,” may be largely to blame for the general lack of inquiry found within U.S. classrooms. Students as testable objects themselves, and whose role it is to gather discreet bits of data and information are largely subjected to a classroom sphere where the only evidence of relation is between imposed artifacts and superimposed goals. Even good teachers are burdened by the perversion of the “quest for certainty” seen in most schools. Never mind that the reality is itself subjectively constructed–all the tests, the standards, the mission statements, the learning objectives. It makes little difference. Because the presentation of that reality is repeated as “the real world” or “the way it is.” As result, teacher-proof curricula, accountability policies, and the huge focus on both standardization and competition are arguably the very points Dewey is trying to point out as misguided.
There are, of course, examples of some teachers in some schools where active inquiry relations already exist, but they are often few and far between. Pre-ordained and pre-fabricated, the reality of most teacher and student roles in schools have been so long established prior to teachers and students actually entering the hallways, that the task of changing the culture of schools is daunting. When education students enter their course work, it is not without ideas and experiences that inform what they want to do and how they want to do it, it simply is with virtually no change whatsoever in the culture from which they came. They were reared as spectators (and often spectate in their college classes, too) and even when some students profess to wanting to “engage” their students in “active” learning, it still usually ends up being a souped-up version of traditional schooling.
Dewey’s position however, is an offering. It’s a possible “out.” It represents one way students and teachers might develop relations in less contrived ways than what currently goes on in most schools. By shifting roles of teachers and students so that both groups are inquirers into problems they face, the “quest for certainty” goes out the window and the expectation for both the “quest” and the “certainty” is challenged. In place of certainty is inquiry–knowing–and it comes into being when the engagement between teachers and students (and students and students, parents and students, etc.) supports investigations and experiments leading to directed action leading to continual knowing.
The Power of the Ideal
By Jim Garrison
An unseen power controlling our destiny becomes the power of an ideal. . . The artist, scientist, citizen, parent, as far as they are actuated by the spirit of their callings, are controlled by the unseen For all endeavor for the better is moved by faith in what is possible, not by adherence to the actual. A Common Faith, LW 9:17
Many teachers experience their choice to enter teaching in the etymological sense of “vocation” that derives from vocare, a calling. If you are among those who entered teaching because you experienced a call to serve, you felt possessed by something unseen, difficult to name, and beyond your capacity to control or even fully comprehend. The word “religion” derives from a root that means being bound or tied to a particular way of life. At the start of your career, you felt bound to your calling, to the particular way of life that is teaching. Do you still?
Whether committed to formal religion or not, you may have a sense of religious wonder, a natural piety toward the infinite plenitude of existence and your place in it. It is an attitude born of passion, guided by imagination, and sustained by intelligent faith in possibility. It is a source of wisdom lying beyond knowledge of ideas and facts alone. That is why even those who have taught for many years without losing the call often still find it difficult to articulate their spiritual sense of teaching.
We may think of spirituality as an intimate, dynamic, and harmonious union with the universe that sustains us wherein our creative acts matter in the course of cosmos. Dewey thought every individual an active participant in an unfinished and unfinishable universe rather than a spectator of a complete or completable creation. Our six senses do not engender universal unity and harmony unaided. Such unity is not a fact of existence; indeed, there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary. This unity lies beyond the actual state of affairs in our world as we find it today, or in any other day, in the history of humankind. It is unseen ideal, discerned only by emotion and imagination, of a possible cosmos beyond the chaos of our actual everyday affairs. For those who feel called and whose faith sustains them, imaginary ideals take possession of them with a power they cannot resist. For those with courage to believe and the passion to pursue things unseen, along with the honesty to accept what their intelligently guided inquiry discloses, the age of revelation is not past. Initially, such a powerful spiritual ideal seems far beyond the call to teach, but it is not.
The death of a single living creature is a greater loss to the universe than the collapse of a whole galaxy lacking living beings. And the procreation of a child is a grander act of creation than the constitution of lifeless worlds. When teachers connect and care for with such divine beings and help awaken in them the light of learning, they bring into existence a radiance that outshines the brightest sun. Such care and creation has wonderful spiritual qualities.
Teachers enter teaching and remain for two principle reasons. First, they seek to care for their students, connect with them, and help them learn and grow. Some are not even afraid to say they love their students. Second, they seek creative autonomy. Nothing known to us is more precious than intimate relations with other human beings, nor anything more miraculous than contributing to creating a life worth living for others and our selves. Therein reside the spiritual values of the call to teach even when it remains hidden beneath the daily details of busy classroom lives. It is what gives the profoundest of meaning to the simplest acts of teaching. There are always immaculate moments waiting to shine through the clouds.
The busyness demanded by the bureaucratic forces of unreflective accountability does much to extinguish creativity and connection in teaching and thereby cancel the spiritual values that call and sustain teachers. Instead of honoring the numinous, technocrats reduce everything to numbers. They do not see students and teachers as unique human beings that must achieve a unique destiny to make unique contribution to a free and democratic community. Instead, they reduce students and teachers alike to calculable ciphers in the economic production function. Here the powers that control our destiny demand we adhere to the actual conditions of material existence rather than demonstrate faith in unseen possibilities. Confronted with such conditions, many teachers burn out and leave. Only those of you who have the imagination to comprehend the possible beyond the actual, the faith in things unseen, and who answer your calling wisely will find the values and courage you need to sustain yourself. You are among those teachers who abide in the place to which you were called while finding intimate, harmonious, and creative union with the larger whole of which you are a part. You are among those who realize the meaningful ideals of the spirit instead of the materialistic ideals of mammon.
Becoming a Student of Teaching.
By Robert Bullough
“The teacher who leaves the professional schools with power in managing a class of children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital command of psychology, logic, and ethics of development. But later ‘progress’ may with such consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching... Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he can not grow as a teacher.”
From: Dewey, John. The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education, Third Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 1904, p. 15.
When educators speak about their teacher preparation they commonly use the word “training” to describe the process. We tell others that we attended a teacher training program at a university or college. We graduated trained and certified to teach. It is easy to dismiss use of this term by saying, “Oh, it's just a word.” But words name worlds and form realities; and the use of this particular word brings with it much mischief, as Dewey implies.
Dogs are trained by their masters to walk on their hind legs and beg for a biscuit. Elephants are trained to sit on a barrel, raise their trunks to the sky, and trumpet for adoring crowds. On the human side, soldiers, among others, are also trained. On the darkest of nights, infantrymen can disassemble and reassemble M-16 rifles with staggering speed. Soldiers are trained to react, and react swiftly and seemingly without thought to signs of danger. Through drill and practice, responses are wired in. When facing danger procedures that have been learned click in and direct action. In each of these examples, four-legged and two-legged, ends are known in advance. There is no room for deviation nor for individual initiative. So it is in teaching, as Dewey suggests, that an emphasis on training over education leaves little room for teacher growth.
In teaching, outcomes are rarely, if ever, predictable. No matter how hard we try to manage teaching and to make our actions produce the results intended by us or desired by others they never do, not quite. When teaching something inevitably happens that disrupts the flow of the day and forces the setting aside of even the most carefully crafted plan. Something more important for learning suddenly presents itself to us or something grimly insistent comes along and demands precious classroom time and moral space: A child gets hurt and tears flow; a dirty joke is told, a gasp heard, and muffled and disruptive conversation follows in the back of the room; a child makes an amazing and unexpected achievement and spontaneously the class erupts into clapping and loud cheering just as the principal walks by the classroom door; Snowball, the beloved class rabbit, gets sick and dies; and, looking outside the school walls, a space shuttle explodes or two airplanes slam into the World Trade Center.
To manage uncertainty, teachers need procedural knowledge, knowledge of routines and the ability to implement them. But given the nature of our work and of the work context, teaching routines often stretch and snap and our teacher habits fail. Then what? At this moment, teachers face a choice: Exercising power, they can bring punishments and rewards to bear in the attempt to reestablish a failed routine by altering the context to better fit that routine; they can switch to another routine (assuming another is known); or they can reconsider the entire situation and reorganize it toward in order to achieve another and different end. The last response is only possible when the teacher understands self, teaching, and the context of teaching deeply and richly; when the teacher is educated, not merely trained, to teach and is a student of teaching, just as Dewey suggests. Otherwise, routines define the day, and in defining the day bind the teacher and limit learning. Maintaining routines becomes the end of education rather than a means for its achievement.
Dewey's statement requires consideration here of an additional word and distinction: The word is “professional.” Over the past few decades, designating someone a professional has lost much of its meaning and nearly all of its cachet. It is a word that has been co-opted by barbers, plumbers, and, if we can believe the movies, “hit men.” But the distinctive feature and defining characteristic of a professional compared to a non-professional is that the professional learns from experience: The professional is a student of his or her own practice and development and in studying that practice and development is one who constantly grows in understanding and in ability.
In the hands of professionals, a practice becomes increasingly personal, nuanced and subtle and problems--when something does not unfold as anticipated or falls outside of preferred practice--are taken as invitations to reconsider personal and professional beliefs, knowledge, including of subject matter, and skills and not reasons for dismay or disillusionment. Problems are invitations to get deeper into ourselves, those we teach, our subject matter, and into our situations. Ever learning, the professional teacher knows him or herself well, seeks to uncover blind spots, prejudices, and weaknesses, as well as to discover strengths upon which to build. He or she is forward looking, imagining then seeking better and more interesting ways of being with and for young people. Self-critical, the professional can attribute causes, but does so in humility and without placing blame. Instead, he or she accepts responsibility for his or her actions and their educational consequences.
Like trained teachers, newcomers to teaching often look outside of themselves when something goes awry. They tend to blame others, their own teachers, cooperating teachers, and their teacher education programs as well as their students and their backgrounds, for failure. Having long been the recipients of teacher classroom offerings, they tend to assume teaching is a simple matter: one dispenses what one knows and disciplines recalcitrants. Not being privy to the professional's inner logic, its evolution, nor to the origins of that logic, they inevitably under appreciate the difficulty and complexity of effective teaching. Assuming one learns to teach by teaching--one just does it--they sometimes succumb to the temptation to reduce especially artful performance to a matter of time and training, of learning and then practicing the application of a few rules that folk wisdom and occasionally researchers promise will lead to skilled practice. But, the promise inevitably proves to be only somewhat or sometimes true. This is one of the sources of what is called “reality shock” among beginners, the discovery that teaching is not quite as easy as it looked from the student side of the teacher’s desk and that learning to teach is much, much, more difficult than ever imagined. Practice, they discover, does not make perfect, especially when practice is made routine and inflexible. Nor does mimicry equal mastery.
Teachers are surrounded by events that call forth wonder and surprise, and it is precisely these emotions that make teaching potentially such an interesting and satisfying relationship and so fascinating and fulfilling a form of human expression. Only teachers who are students of teaching, knowledgeable and engaged professionals who are morally centered and who can flexibly and purposefully respond to the shifting emotional and intellectual terrain of the classroom, are capable of realizing this potential or even of recognizing it. Students of teaching know that chaos is forever residing just around the corner and that teachers face it mostly alone. They feel vulnerable, exposed, but not fearful for they also know that opportunity stands just around that corner and that they are prepared and willing to embrace it. If, as teachers, we are merely trained and are generally fearful of failure and desirous to contain the unexpected, we are going to miss the opportunities for growth that teaching provides, perhaps not today but most assuredly tomorrow. Clearly, teaching is not for the feint of heart but a calling for the adventurous of mind and spirit.
Here are sample entries from the first edition:
A Spectator's Version of Knowledge
By Deron Boyles
We see that knowing is not the act of an outside spectator but of a participator inside the natural and social scene, then the true object of knowledge resides in consequences of directed action. (Quest, 157)
Armchair quarterbacks who complain about botched passes. Well-meaning friends who suggest your child should play the violin. Accountability-minded administrators who use check lists during classroom observations. Each of these groups of people “know” things. The armchair quarterback gets to see instant replays. The friend gets to project wishes onto a child they don’t live with 24/7. The administrator gets to use a check-list to determine that you need better classroom management skills. Each group has knowledge. But the knowledge they have is not only limited, it isn’t that important. The armchair quarterback isn’t actually on the field staring at advancing defensive lineman and making immediate decisions about passing the football. The friend isn’t around long enough to know whether the child is talented, disciplined, or even interested in music. The administrator isn’t in the classroom with the various students long enough to understand the culture of your room.
The real trick in understanding the point is to acknowledge that teachers suffer from the same problem: they often treat their students like they are treated. Teachers become armchair quarterbacks, well-meaning friends, and administrators to their students. Covering material because of ITBS or other standardized testing constraints, assuming they know what students need without getting to know students first, and imposing their own version of check-lists in the form of worksheets and other busy work that are detached from students’ lives–teachers fall into the same trap that Dewey warns us about. We can’t treat knowledge as a static entity. Knowledge isn’t a series of discreet bits of information passed from a teacher to a student, even though that a major assumption we carry with us. In fact, knowledge isn’t really the point, at all. Knowing is the point. And the risk in not understanding the difference is in turning students into the same kinds of spectators that armchair quarterbacks, well-meaning friends, accountability-minded administrators, (and teachers) often represent.
So, for Dewey, his point was to explain (1) what it means to say that a statement about how things are may or may not correspond to how things actually are, when at the same time, (2) it is not possible to step back and treat this correspondence as if it were a matter of comparing the statement against reality. What we have to do is make judgements in “real time” about consequences of actions in solving actual problems. Correspondence, then, becomes a metaphor for Dewey, allowing him to point out that while a “spectator” version of knowledge is not always wrong, neither does it describe nor explain how people actually use information from their lives to solve problems that they face. The relevance of the “spectator” is in the very detachment Dewey rejects. “Spectators” don’t assert, they passively observe. “Spectators” are outside of experience–at least the kind of experience that is engaging of others.
Here it may be helpful to distinguish between a few key concepts in order to better understand the larger point and it’s relationship to classroom interaction. Knowing, knowledge, and intelligence are distinct for Dewey. Knowing is an inquiry (specific instances of applying oneself to solving problems), knowledge constitutes the stable outcomes of inquiry, and intelligence is the result of the development and accumulation of capabilities to act (i.e., inquire) in specific ways.
Organic and natural environments for learning impel knowing and the habits of intelligence. Detachment from natural environments for learning impel “spectating” and habits of routine. When you participate in the “consequences of directed action,” you side with active inquiry. That is, given Dewey’s theory of knowledge/knowing, classrooms should be places where students make knowledge claims at the very same time they are engaged in knowing (inquiry), since the means and ends are not separable for Dewey, and since the point of inquiry is not to collect detached artifacts anyway. Active engagement of the sort Dewey suggests means students engage rather than observe. They are not in the business of “discovering” the “facts” as though there is some cosmic puzzle to solve for once and for all. Rather, active inquiry puts functionality above abstraction. Active inquiry means students developing problems and actually solving them. As a result, a general pattern emerges where students use their own experiences (individual and joint) as a backdrop to solve other problems. Like an ever-expanding upward spiral, students develop and grow best when their interests are engaged and utilized. Of course, not all inquiry is fruitful. That’s why Dewey talks about “directed action.” Some actions are whim and do not lead to educative experiences. The teacher, then, rather than “directing” students to be “spectators,” directs students toward engage activities, that is, to active inquiry that leads to further inquiry (and knowing). Be clear: directing students to prefabricated “learning centers” or “activity centers” to do busy work is not what Dewey is talking about. Dewey is talking about students becoming experimenters themselves.
Students, therefore, no longer search for “the truth” or “the right answers”; rather, students make assertions that are to be judged by the bounds of their own experiences–bounds that already exist and bounds that expand via inquiry and directed action. This not only represents a big shift in understanding the roles of teachers and students, it shifts the purpose of schooling away from “getting” answers, grades, diplomas, and jobs (Dewey obliquely called this the “quest for certainty”). Such a “quest for certainty,” may be largely to blame for the general lack of inquiry found within U.S. classrooms. Students as testable objects themselves, and whose role it is to gather discreet bits of data and information are largely subjected to a classroom sphere where the only evidence of relation is between imposed artifacts and superimposed goals. Even good teachers are burdened by the perversion of the “quest for certainty” seen in most schools. Never mind that the reality is itself subjectively constructed–all the tests, the standards, the mission statements, the learning objectives. It makes little difference. Because the presentation of that reality is repeated as “the real world” or “the way it is.” As result, teacher-proof curricula, accountability policies, and the huge focus on both standardization and competition are arguably the very points Dewey is trying to point out as misguided.
There are, of course, examples of some teachers in some schools where active inquiry relations already exist, but they are often few and far between. Pre-ordained and pre-fabricated, the reality of most teacher and student roles in schools have been so long established prior to teachers and students actually entering the hallways, that the task of changing the culture of schools is daunting. When education students enter their course work, it is not without ideas and experiences that inform what they want to do and how they want to do it, it simply is with virtually no change whatsoever in the culture from which they came. They were reared as spectators (and often spectate in their college classes, too) and even when some students profess to wanting to “engage” their students in “active” learning, it still usually ends up being a souped-up version of traditional schooling.
Dewey’s position however, is an offering. It’s a possible “out.” It represents one way students and teachers might develop relations in less contrived ways than what currently goes on in most schools. By shifting roles of teachers and students so that both groups are inquirers into problems they face, the “quest for certainty” goes out the window and the expectation for both the “quest” and the “certainty” is challenged. In place of certainty is inquiry–knowing–and it comes into being when the engagement between teachers and students (and students and students, parents and students, etc.) supports investigations and experiments leading to directed action leading to continual knowing.
The Power of the Ideal
By Jim Garrison
An unseen power controlling our destiny becomes the power of an ideal. . . The artist, scientist, citizen, parent, as far as they are actuated by the spirit of their callings, are controlled by the unseen For all endeavor for the better is moved by faith in what is possible, not by adherence to the actual.
A Common Faith, LW 9:17
Many teachers experience their choice to enter teaching in the etymological sense of “vocation” that derives from vocare, a calling. If you are among those who entered teaching because you experienced a call to serve, you felt possessed by something unseen, difficult to name, and beyond your capacity to control or even fully comprehend. The word “religion” derives from a root that means being bound or tied to a particular way of life. At the start of your career, you felt bound to your calling, to the particular way of life that is teaching. Do you still?
Whether committed to formal religion or not, you may have a sense of religious wonder, a natural piety toward the infinite plenitude of existence and your place in it. It is an attitude born of passion, guided by imagination, and sustained by intelligent faith in possibility. It is a source of wisdom lying beyond knowledge of ideas and facts alone. That is why even those who have taught for many years without losing the call often still find it difficult to articulate their spiritual sense of teaching.
We may think of spirituality as an intimate, dynamic, and harmonious union with the universe that sustains us wherein our creative acts matter in the course of cosmos. Dewey thought every individual an active participant in an unfinished and unfinishable universe rather than a spectator of a complete or completable creation. Our six senses do not engender universal unity and harmony unaided. Such unity is not a fact of existence; indeed, there is a great deal of evidence to the contrary. This unity lies beyond the actual state of affairs in our world as we find it today, or in any other day, in the history of humankind. It is unseen ideal, discerned only by emotion and imagination, of a possible cosmos beyond the chaos of our actual everyday affairs. For those who feel called and whose faith sustains them, imaginary ideals take possession of them with a power they cannot resist. For those with courage to believe and the passion to pursue things unseen, along with the honesty to accept what their intelligently guided inquiry discloses, the age of revelation is not past. Initially, such a powerful spiritual ideal seems far beyond the call to teach, but it is not.
The death of a single living creature is a greater loss to the universe than the collapse of a whole galaxy lacking living beings. And the procreation of a child is a grander act of creation than the constitution of lifeless worlds. When teachers connect and care for with such divine beings and help awaken in them the light of learning, they bring into existence a radiance that outshines the brightest sun. Such care and creation has wonderful spiritual qualities.
Teachers enter teaching and remain for two principle reasons. First, they seek to care for their students, connect with them, and help them learn and grow. Some are not even afraid to say they love their students. Second, they seek creative autonomy. Nothing known to us is more precious than intimate relations with other human beings, nor anything more miraculous than contributing to creating a life worth living for others and our selves. Therein reside the spiritual values of the call to teach even when it remains hidden beneath the daily details of busy classroom lives. It is what gives the profoundest of meaning to the simplest acts of teaching. There are always immaculate moments waiting to shine through the clouds.
The busyness demanded by the bureaucratic forces of unreflective accountability does much to extinguish creativity and connection in teaching and thereby cancel the spiritual values that call and sustain teachers. Instead of honoring the numinous, technocrats reduce everything to numbers. They do not see students and teachers as unique human beings that must achieve a unique destiny to make unique contribution to a free and democratic community. Instead, they reduce students and teachers alike to calculable ciphers in the economic production function. Here the powers that control our destiny demand we adhere to the actual conditions of material existence rather than demonstrate faith in unseen possibilities. Confronted with such conditions, many teachers burn out and leave. Only those of you who have the imagination to comprehend the possible beyond the actual, the faith in things unseen, and who answer your calling wisely will find the values and courage you need to sustain yourself. You are among those teachers who abide in the place to which you were called while finding intimate, harmonious, and creative union with the larger whole of which you are a part. You are among those who realize the meaningful ideals of the spirit instead of the materialistic ideals of mammon.
Becoming a Student of Teaching.
By Robert Bullough
“The teacher who leaves the professional schools with power in managing a class of children may appear to superior advantage the first day, the first week, the first month, or even the first year, as compared with some other teacher who has a much more vital command of psychology, logic, and ethics of development. But later ‘progress’ may with such consist only in perfecting and refining skill already possessed. Such persons seem to know how to teach, but they are not students of teaching... Unless a teacher is such a student, he may continue to improve in the mechanics of school management, but he can not grow as a teacher.”
From: Dewey, John. The Relation of Theory to Practice in Education, Third Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, 1904, p. 15.
When educators speak about their teacher preparation they commonly use the word “training” to describe the process. We tell others that we attended a teacher training program at a university or college. We graduated trained and certified to teach. It is easy to dismiss use of this term by saying, “Oh, it's just a word.” But words name worlds and form realities; and the use of this particular word brings with it much mischief, as Dewey implies.
Dogs are trained by their masters to walk on their hind legs and beg for a biscuit. Elephants are trained to sit on a barrel, raise their trunks to the sky, and trumpet for adoring crowds. On the human side, soldiers, among others, are also trained. On the darkest of nights, infantrymen can disassemble and reassemble M-16 rifles with staggering speed. Soldiers are trained to react, and react swiftly and seemingly without thought to signs of danger. Through drill and practice, responses are wired in. When facing danger procedures that have been learned click in and direct action. In each of these examples, four-legged and two-legged, ends are known in advance. There is no room for deviation nor for individual initiative. So it is in teaching, as Dewey suggests, that an emphasis on training over education leaves little room for teacher growth.
In teaching, outcomes are rarely, if ever, predictable. No matter how hard we try to manage teaching and to make our actions produce the results intended by us or desired by others they never do, not quite. When teaching something inevitably happens that disrupts the flow of the day and forces the setting aside of even the most carefully crafted plan. Something more important for learning suddenly presents itself to us or something grimly insistent comes along and demands precious classroom time and moral space: A child gets hurt and tears flow; a dirty joke is told, a gasp heard, and muffled and disruptive conversation follows in the back of the room; a child makes an amazing and unexpected achievement and spontaneously the class erupts into clapping and loud cheering just as the principal walks by the classroom door; Snowball, the beloved class rabbit, gets sick and dies; and, looking outside the school walls, a space shuttle explodes or two airplanes slam into the World Trade Center.
To manage uncertainty, teachers need procedural knowledge, knowledge of routines and the ability to implement them. But given the nature of our work and of the work context, teaching routines often stretch and snap and our teacher habits fail. Then what? At this moment, teachers face a choice: Exercising power, they can bring punishments and rewards to bear in the attempt to reestablish a failed routine by altering the context to better fit that routine; they can switch to another routine (assuming another is known); or they can reconsider the entire situation and reorganize it toward in order to achieve another and different end. The last response is only possible when the teacher understands self, teaching, and the context of teaching deeply and richly; when the teacher is educated, not merely trained, to teach and is a student of teaching, just as Dewey suggests. Otherwise, routines define the day, and in defining the day bind the teacher and limit learning. Maintaining routines becomes the end of education rather than a means for its achievement.
Dewey's statement requires consideration here of an additional word and distinction: The word is “professional.” Over the past few decades, designating someone a professional has lost much of its meaning and nearly all of its cachet. It is a word that has been co-opted by barbers, plumbers, and, if we can believe the movies, “hit men.” But the distinctive feature and defining characteristic of a professional compared to a non-professional is that the professional learns from experience: The professional is a student of his or her own practice and development and in studying that practice and development is one who constantly grows in understanding and in ability.
In the hands of professionals, a practice becomes increasingly personal, nuanced and subtle and problems--when something does not unfold as anticipated or falls outside of preferred practice--are taken as invitations to reconsider personal and professional beliefs, knowledge, including of subject matter, and skills and not reasons for dismay or disillusionment. Problems are invitations to get deeper into ourselves, those we teach, our subject matter, and into our situations. Ever learning, the professional teacher knows him or herself well, seeks to uncover blind spots, prejudices, and weaknesses, as well as to discover strengths upon which to build. He or she is forward looking, imagining then seeking better and more interesting ways of being with and for young people. Self-critical, the professional can attribute causes, but does so in humility and without placing blame. Instead, he or she accepts responsibility for his or her actions and their educational consequences.
Like trained teachers, newcomers to teaching often look outside of themselves when something goes awry. They tend to blame others, their own teachers, cooperating teachers, and their teacher education programs as well as their students and their backgrounds, for failure. Having long been the recipients of teacher classroom offerings, they tend to assume teaching is a simple matter: one dispenses what one knows and disciplines recalcitrants. Not being privy to the professional's inner logic, its evolution, nor to the origins of that logic, they inevitably under appreciate the difficulty and complexity of effective teaching. Assuming one learns to teach by teaching--one just does it--they sometimes succumb to the temptation to reduce especially artful performance to a matter of time and training, of learning and then practicing the application of a few rules that folk wisdom and occasionally researchers promise will lead to skilled practice. But, the promise inevitably proves to be only somewhat or sometimes true. This is one of the sources of what is called “reality shock” among beginners, the discovery that teaching is not quite as easy as it looked from the student side of the teacher’s desk and that learning to teach is much, much, more difficult than ever imagined. Practice, they discover, does not make perfect, especially when practice is made routine and inflexible. Nor does mimicry equal mastery.
Teachers are surrounded by events that call forth wonder and surprise, and it is precisely these emotions that make teaching potentially such an interesting and satisfying relationship and so fascinating and fulfilling a form of human expression. Only teachers who are students of teaching, knowledgeable and engaged professionals who are morally centered and who can flexibly and purposefully respond to the shifting emotional and intellectual terrain of the classroom, are capable of realizing this potential or even of recognizing it. Students of teaching know that chaos is forever residing just around the corner and that teachers face it mostly alone. They feel vulnerable, exposed, but not fearful for they also know that opportunity stands just around that corner and that they are prepared and willing to embrace it. If, as teachers, we are merely trained and are generally fearful of failure and desirous to contain the unexpected, we are going to miss the opportunities for growth that teaching provides, perhaps not today but most assuredly tomorrow. Clearly, teaching is not for the feint of heart but a calling for the adventurous of mind and spirit.